By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 'Hack or be hacked': Why kids need to know how technology works
Jesse Hirsh, CBC, 2015/05/21
Whose responsibility is it to prevent hacking and to promote security? I have two stories in my inbox today - this one and this one - that suggest it's the user's responsibility. In one, " Jesse Hirsh makes the case for a deeper understanding of technology as a civic duty. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Speaking out on Elsevier’s Article “Sharing” Policy
Heather Joseph, SPARC, 2015/05/21
About three weeks ago, Elsevier released a new policy governing open access publication. The response from the academic community was immediate and unfavourable, including this statement, signed by a couple dozen groups, criticizing the policy. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The K12 Education Market
Rachel Norris, PILOTed, 2015/05/21
Short article making the impoirtant point that the K-12 education market is a complex array of interplaying forces, including several levels of government, corporations, lobbyists, school boards, and finally, teachers and children. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Human Capital Report 2015
Various authors, World Economic Forum, 2015/05/21
Just for the record, if there's any term I like less than the term 'human resources' (or as it's abbreviated around here, 'resources'), it's the term 'human capital'. The term implies the commodification not only of the talents and skills people possess and can apply in the workplace, but of the people themselves. But that's what we get from the World Economic Forum. So now I haven't read the full 319 page PDF (I spent the day writing a quarterly report - yay!) but it's not the sort of report you read cover-to-cover anyways, as it's mostly a set of league tables comparing countries. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Do we actually want to close the achievement gap?
Ewan McIntosh, edu.blogs.com, 2015/05/19
I'm not sure exactly what the "achievement gap" is supposed to be - if I look at my life, do I have an "achievement gap" with respect to Jose Bautista? Or Twitter newb Barack Obama? Having said that, I'm generally in agreement with Brian Boyd's suggestions as summarized by Ewan McIntosh. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Telepresence Helps Universities Connect Virtual Students with Campus Life
Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education, 2015/05/19
This is an application of technology I'm not so sure of. The idea is to give virtual students the feeling of actually being on campus. So the the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has set up live video feeds their faces on tablets mounted on top of telepresence robots they remotely move around the stage and auditorium. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The coming hundred years, in one hundred words
Kevin Kelly, The Technium, 2015/05/18
Kevin Kelly invited his friends to contribute a 100-word prediction of the world in a hundred years. It's always interesting to think about how I would respond. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Excellence is not the only point of education
Sam Carr, The Conversation, 2015/05/18
Doug Belshaw points toward this item from The Conversation in his weekly newsletter. The argument is that we should not allow business words, like 'excellence', to seep into education. More...
By Jen T. Kwok (NTEU National Office). The reason Australia’s higher education system has slipped from number nine to number ten in the U21 Ranking of National Higher Education Systems for 2015 is because of Australia’s appallingly low level of public investment in our universities, the NTEU said today.By Jen T. Kwok (NTEU National Office). The 2015-16 Federal Budget was relatively subdued in relation to the higher education portfolio, with no major announcements or shifts in direction from the Commonwealth Government. As the NTEU had anticipated, this year’s Budget included a commitment to the government’s long-term deregulation plans, to deregulate higher education student fees, open up funding for sub-degree qualifications, and to open public funding to for-profit private providers, despite these being defeated twice by the Senate. More...
